Oh Darling, What Have I Done?
by jessicalange
Summary: Hank was gone, a liar and a cheater. Her mother was gone, a liar and a murderer. set after ep 6. cordelia & fiona.


Cordelia Foxx found herself slipping into a sort of trance, not sleeping but not awake; a sort of in-between piece of reality where she was perfectly aware of the things around her and not quite yet sleeping. It was night; she knew that well enough, for her mother had come in late and attempted to be quiet as she staggered across the foyer and up the stairs into her room. But Cordelia had not slept. She found herself unable to; no matter the blankets she piled atop herself, her hands were always cold and always shaking, and yet she could feel the sweat rolling down her spine. She was hyperaware of everything around her; even her mother in her room a couple doors down from her own, groaning. It was a tired groan; not a sexual one, for which Cordelia was infinitely pleased about. She could not see, but she could feel, and she could hear - and she _could_ see, only in a much different way.

Hank was gone, a liar and a cheater. Her mother was gone, a liar and a murderer. It made her stomach roil merely thinking about it, hearing Myrtle's screams in her ears and head, seeing the flames - _feeling_ the flames, almost.

She had long since stopped crying, staring blankly into the space before her that she could not see. At one point in the middle of the night, she heard her mother emerge from her room again, and the woman's footsteps coming down the hall. Instead of walking past her room, however, Fiona stopped outside of it and opened the door. Cordelia could hear her flick on the light and the slight surprised exhale her mother offered when she found Cordelia sitting up in bed, looking ahead.

"Delia?" Her voice was soft, gentle - _kind_. She had never imagined her mother being kind; especially not to her, not ever. And then she had returned, and she had become blind, and her mother had sat her hospital bed for days as she recovered - and it was so hard, so _difficult_ and so utterly, endlessly _painful_ to associate the woman her mother was turning into for _her_ with the person her mother always had been. A murderer; cruel, cold, heartless.

Her tone now, was not false; it was not some ruse, a farce to trick Cordelia into believing her mother had changed. It was _real_; but how could it be real when her mother, in all actuality, was so - _evil_?

_I wanted to tell you, Delia, but you were in so much pain and I didn't want to add to it._

Well, wasn't that just a crock of _shit_, to coin a popularly-used phrase from her mother? Cordelia was not stupid enough to say or to think that it could not get worse than it already was - but she had taken it all so far, hadn't she? It didn't matter what pain was added to the rest. It didn't matter what her mother dumped on her. It didn't matter - it hadn't ever mattered, not to her mother. But now that she had gotten acid splashed in her face, her mother _cared_, because her daughter was broken and destroyed and ruined.

"Did I wake you up?"

"No," Cordelia assured quietly, turning her head just slightly. "I never fell asleep." She could hear Fiona step forward, across the room to her, and was relieved to find that her mother was wise enough not to touch her again; instead, the woman sat on the edge of her bed.

"Delia," her mother began, her voice guilt-stricken, "I didn't mean for you to find out this way. I wanted you tell you. I didn't want you to be angry at me. You were just so hurt, and I didn't-"

She could feel the tiniest brush of skin against skin; her mother's hand slipped into her own badly shaking one, and Cordelia yelped like a wounded beast, flinching violently away from her mother's touch. "No-no, don't touch me! Don't touch me, please-I don't want to see-" Her mother's hushed, comforting murmurings fell silent, as did her own panicked shrieking when nothing happened. The tips of her fingers remaining hooked around her mother's own, she slid her hand forward until their palms were meeting. There was no telltale tugging feeling at her insides; the nausea that had been there before her mother had entered did not increase, and there was no sight, no vision; no flash.

Cordelia whimpered with a heavy sort of relief, and she hated that her instinctive reaction was to close her fingers around her mother's hand, if only to gain some sort of comfort from it.

She didn't want her mother to be here, with her. She wanted her to _leave_. Leave the room. Leave the school. Leave New Orleans; return to L.A., or wherever she had gone, somewhere far away from her daughter. Her mother's touch made her stomach roll with nausea, and at the same time she drew comfort from it.

She pulled away, almost reluctantly. "Mother, can you just-can you just leave, please?"

Cordelia could hear her mother's sharp intake of breath, as though Cordelia had physically wounded her with her words, and it was terrible how _she_ felt guilty. Her mother should be the one feeling guilty; her mother should be the one in tears. Cordelia had done nothing. She sank beneath the sheets and turned her back away from Fiona, feeling like she wanted to cry. Again.

But she didn't. She must have laid there for twenty minutes and she did not cry, and Fiona did not move from her position beside her, a hand on Cordelia's blanket-covered back. She wanted to scream, to break this facade of false sleep and shove her mother from the bed and send her from the room, but she did none of those things. She closed her eyes, fingers trembling as she pressed them against her mouth to keep from making a single noise. She could hear Fiona's shaky sigh. Her _tearful_ sigh. It made her feel even worse, and while she wanted to get rid of that feeling, she was unable to.

"I love you, Delia," the Supreme of Witches murmured, the woman who had killed people, the woman who had burned the witch who Cordelia considered an aunt at the stake, the woman who had sent her off to a boarding school; the neglectful woman who had abandoned her, and treated her so cruelly. The woman who had probably done so many unforgivable things that Cordelia did not even _know_ of.

That same woman bent down and pressed chapped lips to Cordelia's forehead. It came as no surprise to Cordelia that her mother's breath smelled faintly of whiskey, her flowery perfume as overpowering as usual even when there was no one around to care about such a thing. Such smells would have been comforting at one point in her life; perhaps even now if she did not feel so sick. But she did feel sick.

Long fingers stroked her hair briefly, and then the bed, which had sank underneath her mother's weight, had risen again.

_I love you, Delia_. Those words echoed throughout Cordelia's mind until her head hurt.

The door closed behind Fiona.

Now, Cordelia cried.


End file.
